Ron Kaplan's Baseball Bookshelf
If it fits on a bookshelf, it fits here.
From the category archives:
“Norm” from Cheers passed away yesterday at the age of 76. Here’s his obit from The New York Times. Wendt, who was born in Chicago, was a hard-core White Sox fan, even if he did throw out a first pitch first-pitch came in a Rays jersey. He got to play some ball in the 1986 movie, […]
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Pete Peterson’s national public radio program, Reading Baseball, just celebrated its 400th episode! Mazel tov. Pittsburgh pitcher Paul Skenes is included in Esquire’s “Mavericks of Sports 2025” feature. Skenes is also featured in today’s New York Times Magazine piece, “How Analytics Marginalized Baseball’s Superstar Pitchers: Why has pro baseball made it so hard for today’s […]
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The actor who played the title role in the Dennis the Menace TV show (1959-1963), passed away yesterday at the age of 73. Here’s his obituary from The New York Times. The baseball connection? An episode from the third season featuring none other than Sandy Koufax in “Dennis and the Dodger.” Despite his reputation as […]
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A reminder: The Amazon rankings are updated every hour, so these lists might not be 100 percent accurate by the time you read them (or even by the time I finish posting them). But close enough for government work, as the saying goes (see my piece on “Why Amazon’s search engine sucks“). In addition, occasionally […]
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I had put off an LWF piece on the passing of Rocky Colavito because I was preparing a Bookshelf Conversation with writer and long-time Indians fan Scott Raab. But in my excitement to have my good friend on as a guest, I plum forgot about the Rock. Colavito died December 10 at the age of […]
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Still shocked that Rickey Henderson passed away at the age of 65, just a few days before his Christmas birthday. I always feel an extra pang of regret when someone younger than me dies. Henderson, was what many might call a colorful character. He was inducted into the Hall of Fame in 2009, accumulating 3,055 […]
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Long-time followers of this blog know of my love for the NPR news quiz, Wait Wait… Don’t Tell Me! Once in a while they’ll have some baseball-related topic or guest, as was the case this week in the opening segment, “Who’s Bill This Time?” (The transcript is as accurate as I care to spend the […]
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I love finding baseball readings in “non-traditional” places. You can come across an article here and there in publications like The Atlantic or New York Magazine (have to get to that Roger Angell book by Joe Bonomo), but other places take a little digging. So a hat tip to my old Trader Joe’s buddy Shawn […]
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The legendary actor/singer passed away yesterday at the age of 97. Baseball connections? She played Aimee Alexander, wife to the Hall of Fame pitcher, Grover Cleveland (played by Ronald Reagan), in the 1951 biopic, The Winning Team. Then there was this classic scene in the 1962 classic, That Touch of Mink… Here’s a behind-the-scenes clip […]
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Full disclosure: Prior to this, I have never watched more than a few minutes of DWTS in any of its previous seasons. I know sports figures have competed and some have acquitted themselves very well, but I can only guess the idea to have a bunch of athletes as a stand-alone theme was one of […]
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One of my favorite shows of all times was M*A*S*H. Some of the earlier episodes don’t hold up so well, but one which sticks out is “A War for All Seasons.” Why, you may ask? Because baseball. Stiers — who passed away last Saturday at the age of 75 — played the imperious Major Charles […]
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NOTE: I have been posting these things long enough now that a few have commented that the introductory section isn’t necessary anymore. But I’m leaving it in because, to paraphrase Joe DiMaggio when asked why he played so hard all the time, there may be people who’ve never read the best-seller entries before. So on […]
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One of my new favorite TV shows is Manhattan, based (loosely, I assume) on the men and women who worked on the atomic bomb. The episode “Overlord” highlights the continuing problems caused by Robert Oppenheimer’s frequent absences from project business as he cavorts with his mistress. One of the main characters, Charlie Isaacs, himself a […]
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is available on Amazon.com,
In a former life, I was the sports and features editor for a weekly New Jersey newspaper, where I hosted an award-winning bog about Jews and Sports.
I did a profile piece on the legendary cartoonist Arnold Roth and he was very generous in immortalizing me in this caricature.
My article on Sandy Koufax in the 1965 World Series appears in
My article on the later biographies of Babe Ruth appears in
My article on the Mets’ 1969 postseason appears in
Profiles of several Jewish baseball figures appear in
Nothing succeeds like Succession (Bill Wambsganss)
May 25, 2023
SPOILER ALERT Succession is one of the best — and annoying — TV shows around. Generally, I don’t like shows that glorify the ultra-rich. And I wonder how this is considered a “dramedy,” even though there are some very funny lines in it. My daughter, Rachel, found this Tik-Tok piece from Nameberry.com that theorizes about […]
Tagged as: Bill Wambsganss, Succession
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